1/THREAD: @The Associated Press has published our investigation into how US tech firms enabled China’s digital police state.
@Yael @yaelwrites@mastodon.social & I obtained multiple, massive leaks of internal & classified Chinese gov't and corporate documents running into the tens of thousands:
apnews.com/article/chines
2/What we found was clear: Silicon Valley not only knowingly supplied Chinese police, they largely designed and built China’s surveillance state. Some firms pitched their tech explicitly for the Chinese government to control citizens.
3/It all started when @Yael @yaelwrites@mastodon.social came to me with tens of thousands of emails from Landasoft, a Chinese firm that had designed the software behind Xinjiang’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, responsible for flagging hundreds of thousands for detention in Xinjiang
4/Let me tell you why I got interested.
In March 2018, I went with @Gerry Shih to Kazakhstan to interview the first victim of Xinjiang’s detention camps to go public. Along the way, we met dozens of relatives of people caught in the crackdown.
apnews.com/article/kazakh
5/We heard bizarre stories of how they were grabbed by police & grilled on nonsensical issues.
Tearful relatives told us siblings were detained for sending money for a down payment for a house. Or for calling parents abroad. Or for taking a certain flight.
6/We had no idea what to think. But as stories trickled out, a picture emerged: grading, points systems, aimed at rooting out Xinjiang’s population of anyone opposed to the state or showing signs of religious piety. A new form of Orwellian social control.
apnews.com/article/china-
7/Digging through the Landasoft emails, we found detailed workings of how this system worked. Points. Tags.
Things like “long beards” or “abnormal power or water usage” could get you flagged.
So could sharing a hotel room, train, or flight with someone deemed suspicious.
8/Watch this video piece by my colleagues Serginho Roosblad and Marshall Ritzel for a vivid demonstration of how this technology works: youtube.com/watch?v=uo_-d0
9/Mystery solved. But where did all come from?
I spotted signs of American firms everywhere in the emails. Oracle. Microsoft. Amazon Web Services. And… IBM.
IBM?
10/Looking at corporate reports, I made some major discoveries. Landasoft, the Chinese firm behind Xinjiang’s automated policing platform, had been an IBM agent, selling its i2 police analysis software for years in China that they claimed could prevent terror attacks.
11/i2 is a pioneering police analysis software invented by British mathematicians in the 1990s that claimed to be able to detect “terrorism”.
It came in reaction to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where the IRA set off bombs against the British in bloody sectarian violence.
12/ After the 9/11 attacks, researcher Valdis Krebs claimed it could have been stopped if American intelligence had connected the dots.
“Why wasn't this attack predicted and prevented?” ...Everyone expects the intelligence community to uncover these covert plots and stop them".
13/The surveillance industry boomed. Companies like IBM sold American police and intelligence on “real time crime centers”, which they said could prevent terror attacks.
youtube.com/watch?v=QrpGvm
youtube.com/watch?v=FeZ-Px
14/IBM itself has a history of working with authoritarian regimes.
As documented by journalist and historian Edwin Black in 2001, IBM sold gear to Nazi Germany used to identify and categorize Jews, enabling the Nazis to send them off to concentration camps during the Holocaust.
15/IBM said at the time that it did not have much info about the operations of IBM’s German subsidiary because “most documents were destroyed or lost during the war” & said that its German operations came under the control of the Nazis. It added it took the allegations seriously.
16/I should note: Regarding China, American companies say they have complied with U.S. laws and regulations throughout, including export controls. Today, they say they do not sell their products to the Xinjiang police or other sanctioned entities.
17/Back to China.
Beijing was keen for similar tech. In the boom years of the 2000s, Millions were going online, unrest fermented online. Beijing built a massive digital policing system: the “Golden Shield”.
U.S. firms marketed billions of dollars of surveillance gear to China.
18/ We obtained classified government blueprints for the Golden Shield, Phase II. They show a Chinese defense contractor worked with Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM to design and build the Golden Shield – essentially, the foundation for China’s digital surveillance state.
19/Lacking local expertise, U.S. firm often sold their gear through resellers, run by a crop of Chinese entrepreneurs.
Among them was Zhou Qiang. Hired by a British consultancy out of college, Zhou quit in 1998 to start his own company. His niche: policing software, including i2.
20/i2 licensed Zhou to sell in China. In a presentation marketing i2 to Chinese police, Zhou’s firm touted i2’s use by the American military and intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA.
Zhou was soon positioned for the opportunity of a lifetime.
21/In 2009, protests against the lynching of Uyghurs at a toy factory in southern China spiraled into riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital city.
Hundreds of people, both Uyghur and of China’s Han majority, were shot, stabbed and killed.
apnews.com/general-news-1
22/Faced with threats to the state, China adopted the American anti-terror playbook.
In secret meetings Chinese officials concluded a key reason for the unrest was their inability to identify Uyghurs they deemed separatists, terrorists, and religious extremists.
23/ Authorities didn’t know who to target. Their data was fractured: each department ran their own database with no connection between them. It allowed dissidents to organize opposition to the state.
It was the same issue that plagued American officials in the run up to 9/11.
24/The solution?
The i2 playbook _ fusing data and drawing connections between individuals deemed suspicious.
25/In a 2009 pamphlet, IBM cited the Urumqi riots, saying their tech could help “maintain social stability”:
“Via real-time crime monitoring, early warning and detection systems, valuable information can be gleaned... to provide intelligent analysis for public security organs"
26/IBM acquired i2 and sold it to Chinese police via Landasoft and other agents. Over the years, Landasoft copied i2 and created their own, Chinese version of i2. They didn’t go far for a name, calling it “iTap”.
Zhou and Landasoft did not respond to requests for comment.
27/When we asked IBM for comment, they said they cut relations with Landasoft in 2014 and barred sales to Xinjiang police in 2015.
Asked about their past sales to Chinese police and the Golden Shield, IBM sent us a letter calling it “old, stale interactions”.
28/Meanwhile, knifings and bombings in Xinjiang grew more frequent, peaking in an Urumqi train station bombing that took place hours after Xi Jinping visited. He demanded a crackdown.
apnews.com/general-news-6
29/ That’s when Xinjiang began constructing its digital police state.
After over a decade of buying American predictive policing technology, they knew how to do it.
apnews.com/article/1ec514
30/Xinjiang’s cities were strung with thousands of police checkpoints and millions of cameras.
Massive new data centers were built and strung together, allowing police to fuse data and sift through vast amounts of information to find what they considered potential “terrorists”.
31/By the time authorities launched their mass detention campaign, they had compiled dossiers on huge swaths of Xinjiang’s population.
Terror struck the Uyghur community, as vast numbers disappeared into camps with little explanation other than being flagged as “suspicious”.
32/Xinjiang told us in a 5-page fax such tech is used to “combat terrorist & criminal activity,” that it respects citizens’ privacy and rights & that it does not target ethnicities. They called the U.S. a “true surveillance state,” citing cameras strung up around New York.
33/Going back to that trip to Kazakhstan in March 2018, I felt as though I had finally solved the mystery of what happened.
“Predictive policing” – a concept born in the West & turbocharged by 9/11 – was brought to China by American firms. In China, it took on a life of its own.
34/Today, it has become one of the defining characteristics of a new techno-authoritarianism Beijing has pioneered, one that fuses the old-school secret police and paranoia of Leninist-Maoist Communism with cutting edge tech brought by American capitalism.
Dake Kang
@dakekang
中文名：姜大翼｜Journalist @AP Beijing | 伟大时代的记录者 @美联社北京分社. 推特现在不让没有被验证的账户发私信，你可以用微信联系我（dakekang) 或者电报, Signal, WhatsApp (+1 201 937 9797). 邮箱: dakekang@protonmail.com.
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